Carles Puyol (right) who looks like he just stepped out of a Hapsburg family portrait, heads Spain into the World Cup Final. As a descendant of the Hapsburg’s, Puyol will be looking for some payback by cracking some skulls against the Netherlands on Sunday

My guess is that since LeBron James missed not having a signing day presser coming out of high school, he’s making up for lost time with “The Decision”. Great column on the LeBron “saga” that mercifully ends tonight.

So now these “elites” will become embittered and “cling to martini glasses or environmentalism or antipathy towards people who don’t think like them or anti-American sentiment or anti-capitalism sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Right POTUS?

Unbelievable pictures of Monterrey in the aftermath of Hurricane Alex.

No Barkleyesque elbows will be flung in the direction of Angolan athletes.

Because it is my beloved Tri that is playing, expect to see this in the stands,

[Photo credit: Me. Took it during a México v. Belize match at Reliant Stadium]

The festivities will em, kick off later today. No news if the wonderful folks at the so-called Minuteman Project will stage a whinefest.

That’s today in H-town, yesterday there was a protest led by none other than “local activist”, one might say “community organizer”, Quanell X.

As one might have guessed the protest had to do with racism, perceived or otherwise. Recently, a Bellaire officer, Jeffrey Cotton was acquitted of aggravated assault on Robbie Tolan, a Bellaire youth. Sgt. Cotton shot Tolan while the latter was in his front yard. By all accounts it was a misunderstanding, since Cotton believed that Tolan had stolen a car (the officer punched in the wrong tag number).

A confrontation ensued with the boy’s mother and the officer believed Tolan was reaching for a weapon and opened fire, wounding the young man. Personally, I believe the situation could have been avoided if Tolan had simply followed orders and waited for the misunderstanding to get cleared up.

Maybe it’s just me but if a cop tells me to do something, I’m going to do it and not put up any resistance. Remember folks, there are more of them than there are of you and they carry radios (not to mention guns). Besides, if you’re free of wrongdoing then that will come out in the wash, why aggravate the situation?

Quanell the Tenth decided to stick his nose in all this because Tolan is black and Cotton is white. At the protest, Mr. Tenth said,

This cop is a criminal, this cop should be in jail. If you shoot one more black man in Bellaire in cold blood, then your damn city will go up in flames.

I find his tone very interesting. Yes, it is possible that Cotton’s demeanor was influenced by the fact that Tolan is a young black man. Young black men and the police don’t seem to get along very well. I don’t find it outside the realm of possibility that the officer might not have been so trigger-happy if Tolan was white.

That said, Quanell the Tenth just made it more difficult for young black men in Bellaire. His passionate and extremely careless threat just paints a very negative image of blacks in the minds of Bellaire residents. In their minds, he’s painting an image (if not reinforcing) of black men as being violent, hot-tempered and not too hesitant to making threats. That’s a disservice to the very people he claims to represent.

To me, it’s very similar to when Muslims get their knickers in a twist when anyone suggests that some professing Muslims have violent tendencies.

That is ABC’s projection at least. If this inevitability holds up (and it will), Sen. Obama becomes the first biracial individual to be elected President of these United States.

What I think interesting about this whole deal is the focus on how we as a nation have come a long way in exorcising our racist demons of years past. Tonight I watched/heard a black U.S. Congressman say on national television that (I’m paraphrasing) America is ready to bury its race burden.

Really? I agree, racism (regardless of the criterion) is an evil that should be buried and done away with (one day it will but not by our efforts) but is this nation ready to bury its race burden?

Not judging by this election. Not when a large number of people vote for a candidate based mostly (if not solely) on the basis of the color of his skin (or half of his ancestry).

A black person voting for Barack Obama on the grounds that he’s half-black is just as racist as a white person voting for McCain on the grounds that he isn’t half-black. A Mexican voter voting for a Mexican candidate just because of his ethnicity is equally injurious. Racism is racism no matter who it’s coming from.

I truly believe that true progress would be marked by a total disregard for a candidate’s ethnicity or skin color. Color blindness is not making a huge deal of the melanin a person’s genes are programmed to express. Color blindness is looking past this, not focusing on it as has been done ad nauseam throughout this laborious election process.

Congratulations to Senator Obama on winning what has become, the world’s most important popularity contest. He should thank the press for delivering this victory to him, I would (tonight, ABC’s Diane Sawyer found it a Sisyphean task to contain her glee).

Judging by the amount of people present at his victory party, methinks the President-elect needs a bigger Jeep than this one (click on the pic and watch the celebratory hilarity ensue):

Apparently a West Holly wood man thought it a great Halloween idea to hang a mannequin dressed as Sarah Palin (picture from the story):

According to the story, Chad Michael Morisette, who hung the mannequin by a noose, had this to say about it,

It should be seen as art, and as within the month of October. It’s Halloween, it’s time to be scary it’s time to be spooky.

Now is a good time to remind everyone that if this country were nearly half the neo-con fascist theocracy that folks in some quarters believe it to be, Mr. Morrisette would have been cast in prison and then summarily shot. And oh yeah, his family would be charged for the bullet, but I digress.

No doubt, this election season has been a trying one for all involved. Race, unlike any previous election, is inevitably a focal point due in large part to the fact that one of the nominees is half-black.

In this election you have racists voting for Senator Obama because he is half-black and racists not voting for Senator Obama because he is half-black. These 2 groups of people have more in common than they realize.

I don’t intend to stir the simmering racial pot but a question if I may:

Would a mannequin of Senator Obama hanging from a noose, say in the Deep South, be seen as “art” or as a vicious “hate crime”?

Judging by the irrational hysterics that went on last year in Jena, Louisiana (and parts beyond) methinks the latter…

Those 2 trump what has been told to me : “he gives a good speech”, “he reminds me of JFK”, “he’s for change”

So now Oprah (unabashed Obama honk) is in the news for refusing to have Sarah Palin on her insanely popular show. Granted, O will have her on after the election (probably provided that the GOP doesn’t win) but not anytime before.

Well of course she’s biased ABC (takes one to know one?) but the better question is, “Is she racist?”

I know it sound preposterous (it’s impossible for libs to be racist) but let’s play a bit of “A Time to Kill” pretend.

You have an immensely popular white talk show host who is endorsing a young, charismatic “biracial” GOP Presidential candidate (For example, George Prescott Bush, right). The Dems have a woman VP candidate on their ticket but said talk queen refuses to have her on the show. Now imagine that the Democratic VP candidate is black.

How long would it take for the race-hustlin’ Sharptons and Jacksons of the world to cry bloody racism?

Which is a desription [sic] that fits many in Appalachia — and also a vast swath of African America. So for me, the story here isn’t simply the old, familiar tale of the nation’s stark racial divide, but also another tale, just as old, less often remarked, of how the white poor and the black poor have long been kept at one another’s throats as a means of keeping them from looking too closely or clearly at the ways both are maniuplated by the forces of money and power.

Dr. Zinn also addresses the origins and sordid purpose of this in his classic, A People’s History of the United States. Mainly he deals with the topic in a chapter titled, “Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom”.

A sample,

The need for slave control led to an ingenious device, paying poor whites–themselves so troublesome for two hundred years of southern history–to be overseers of black labor and therefore buffers for black hatred